The Nobel Prize-winning poet and man of letters Octavio Paz was also a
brilliant reader of other writers, and this book selects his best
critical essays from over three decades. In the sixteen pieces collected
here, Paz discusses a wide range of poets and writers, both American and
international, from Robert Frost and Walt Whitman to William Carlos
Williams; from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Luis Buñuel to Alexander
Solzhenitsyn; and from Charles Baudelaire to Jean-Paul Sartre, André
Breton, and Henri Michaux.
Paz writes, "I believe that a writer's attitude to language should be
that of a lover: fidelity and, at the same time, a lack of respect for
the beloved object. Veneration and transgression." When this original
thinker meets these writers, each essay is an adventure of the mind.